


So That the Starving Would Eat

by Roadrat



Series: Union [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, more to come - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-02-16 01:19:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2250510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadrat/pseuds/Roadrat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the trolls have been subjugated for so long, finally a war has come, between the Condesce and her regime on one side, and the mostly troll rebels on the other.  The world will change, but will it be worth it?</p><p>(AU - no sburb.  sequel to Under Your Bed Sat the Wolf)</p><p>
  <b>on indefinite hiatus</b>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Wow it's been ages. Sorry about that.
> 
> If you haven't read Under Your Bed Sat the Wolf, which is the first part in this series, then it's not necessary, but it is highly suggested.
> 
> trigger warning for death, gore and violence.

You know.

This is how it happens.

***

Before long they will realise and crack down on those dangerous thoughts and the way they were spread from one person to a hundred, or a thousand, or more. Until then, those who had suspicions would offer their ideas to the world in one hundred and forty characters or less. They would squawk at each other through their computers, they would make a game of it, a puzzle, that they would only solve in their heads and leave the pieces to rot as if they were worthless.

Do you see the problem? they would say. According to the regime, the trolls set up a bomb, right? Because they wanted to lure humans in and kill them or something. But it doesn't make sense, does it? All these trolls wanted to be treated better, right? What's the point?

And others would fire back: are you stupid? It was a trap, obviously! The trolls just wanted to make it seem like they wanted better. The perfect place and time, the marketplace on Wednesday, when the most people would be in one place, and they get even more to come with the promise of a 'speech'! Tricksters! Things were fine as they were and they knew that, they just wanted to hurt us! Savages, all of them. Well, not all of them, I'm sure there are some who can assimilate, but where are they? Where are they?

No, no, no! the first group would reply. They had their names, the full names of the ones who they say planted the bomb! They found out where they lived! In a matter of minutes! Does that not strike you as suspicious? Trolls have always been attacked for being trolls, why would they make it worse for themselves?

And so on.

Weeks of this, but it is all just theory, all just words. Disgruntled murmurings that most people hope will die out before it causes too much trouble. And it is only when the brave begin to suggest, in small voices at first that get louder and louder, that they should march, show the regime that they shouldn't hide behind lies, that they deserve to know what goes on in this world, that things really begin.

Perhaps begin is not the right word for it. No, you think, nothing really begins. There are stories, but those stories have stories behind them, and behind them are even more stories. You think, maybe, that beginnings only exist where people want them to.

***

You know this will happen, or already is happening, or maybe it has already happened. You know what will happen next, as well. Because you look at the now and you can see what will most likely come. You can piece it together by instinct. But it's like something you read in a book. Something almost fictional to you.

They will march. They will organise themselves through the internet, and pages and pages of plans will sprawl up all over the web, faster than they can be taken down. Eventually, those that spend too much time trawling through these pages find themselves unable to access anything, or they disappear, but it will be too late, because everything is already in motion.

They will collect together in their City's streets, and in the City it had all happened in, that is where the most people will turn out. They will mostly have a grey tint to their skin, mostly have colours in their eyes that aren't natural for humans, mostly have jet black hair and sharp teeth and yellow nails. They will mostly be trolls, but there will be others there as well.

In their hands they raise clumsily painted signs, the words of which are all very different, but the meaning behind all of them largely being “stop being dickwads.” Along the street, covered in kevlar and holding big guns diagonally across their bodies, stand the _jeysha,_ the law-enforcers, all wary and on edge. The people chant and pump their fists into the air, assured in themselves that they are doing something right. And so it goes, a river of people held back by the walls of the _jeysha._

Hundreds have turned out, maybe thousands. And a few are there simply to tell the humans protesting that they had better go back to their homes and forget they even took part in this embarrassment. But they have their voices drowned out by the monolith of protesters. Instead they must ride with the tide, disgruntled and angry as they are pushed forwards by bodies pressed against them from all sides.

They are not the only ones angry, though. Anger courses through these people like blood.

And it comes to a head, only in such a small way no one notices at first.

A woman is pushed hard against one of the _jeysha,_ and the _jundi_ pushes her back. This woman is young and human and she believes she is invincible. So she places her hands on the _jundi's_ shield, collects strength in her legs, and she pushes as hard as she can.

The _jundi_ is shocked, but only for a second. Others have stopped in the flow to watch what he will do. And this _jundi_ is young and human and part of the _jeysha,_ and he believes he is invincible. He raises his gun and whips her round the face with the butt of it.

The woman falls to the floor. People help to pick her back up. She spits blood when she stands, right at the _jundi._ And she goes to grab his gun.

If anything else had happened, it would have been one of many encounters just the same.

The _jundi_ rears back, grappling for the gun, trying to wrest it from the woman's grip. The woman only wants something to hold onto so she can throw him to the ground. She pulls and swears and spits bloody foam at the _jundi's_ masked face, and he, panicked, looks to his left and asks his colleague to help him, help him. What is he supposed to do.

His colleague goes to grab the woman, but she dodges and sends a messy kick in the other _jundi's_ way. People have either backed away or begun to help. They push against the _jeysha,_ screaming about truth and pigs and a lot of other, similar things. It is like a carnival of sound. And the woman is egged on by those around her, and the _jundi_ is terrified and young and does not know what to do.

So when he gets his gun back, tearing it from her fingers, and she reaches out greedily to have it back in her hands, he raises his gun quickly to point at her head and he shoots.

The bullet misses the spot he was aiming for, between the eyes, and instead gouges a path deep in the side of her head on its way to hit a troll man in the arm behind her. The woman falls backwards and from the side of her head comes red blood spreading lazily into a pool that reflects the sky and the few clouds in it. Bits and pieces of her head drift through the air and land on the ground, or on the faces of those standing behind her. The troll man clutches his arm and stumbles backwards, howling and terrified, his eyes huge. The _jundi_ breathes hard and is afraid.

It feels like there is silence for a second, although of course there is not. It feels as though only the ragged breath of that bright young thing on the ground, and that of the bright young thing standing bloodied over her, are the only things that can be heard. And then, with a single mind, the crowd begin to push and scream and curse. The _jundi_ are ordered to open fire.

So they do.

They detach themselves from themselves and they shoot.

People run and scream and try to find a way out. A man pushes through to find an alleyway and is shot three times in the back while he is running. A woman kneels over her matesprit as he gargles and chokes on blood and she is crying. She has bitten her tongue and blood leaks from her mouth and she is beginning to feel dizzy. She looks up to a _jundi_ next to them and she begs. She places her hands on his shield, leaving bloody imprints on the plastic, and begs. She cannot speak, and the _jundi_ only sees a woman with rivers of blood at the side of her mouth, vomiting it into the street, and the _jundi_ is so scared, trying to push this woman away who always keeps coming back, until all that he can think to do is to take his baton from his side and to beat her. And beat her and beat her. He does not stop, he cannot. He has tears in his eyes as he beats her away, until all that is left is a burgundy mess, with hair that sticks out of it like mould. And then he drops his baton and he sees the imprints of the woman's hands on his shield, still begging. He drops that too. He runs.

The world explodes in terror and noise. The crowd disperses. Those that get away huddle in their homes and cry. Now they are sure.

This is how the war begins.

 


	2. John

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is back from the dead

“I know you.”

But he doesn't, not really. He knows your face and your voice. He knows that sometimes you pick your nose and wipe it on Dave's cape, because who wears a cape and honestly he's just asking for it. He knows that you don't like to eat with people since your dad died, and he knows how frustrated you get because it's so hard to be alone here. He knows that you laugh when something terrible happens, and that you've been laughing non-stop for the last few weeks.

Haha. What can you say? There's no malice in it. No joy either. It's not so much a hollow sound as a sound full of everything you don't want to feel just yet. Haha. Hehehe. He he he. He's looking at you weird, now. Calm your laugh into a smile, wear it like an eyepatch. It covers a wound.

“I know it's been hard for you. I know that, I do, I'm sorry. _Fuck_.”

When was the last time you laughed for real? Like in reaction to a joke, or because something made you happy? Come to think of it, why do we even laugh at jokes? That's so weird. Something can be so funny it actually affects how you breathe, totally involuntarily. You laugh. Haha! Laughs are how you tell everyone you're out of control. Why isn't that scary? Maybe that's why crazy people all laugh in movies. You laugh again.  
Are you crazy? Haha. Probably not. Maybe one day.

He knows all the bits of you. You guess that's as close as it's possible to get to knowing someone.

“You're doing that thing again.”  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“You're doing the thing. Your eyes are crossed. John. John! Jesus monkey fuck, could you please listen?”

“Haha. Sorry, Karkat, it's hard to pay attention.”

“To me?”

“Uh, well yeah, in this case. But also more generally.”

“Is this a consequence of you braining yourself on every hard, vertical object of your childhood, or the reason for it?”

“Haha.”

He purses his lips. “You know you can speak to me. Or Harley, Serket, Terezi, Strider.” He says Strider like he's a villain in a kids TV show, counting him off on a fourth finger like he's reluctant to do it. And the thing is, you're pretty sure he likes Dave, only he hates that he likes him. Haha. He's strange like that. He's all contradictions. He's all puppy dog face and weaponised words.

He's all this he's all that

He he he

Ha ha ha.

“You can talk to any of us. About anything. And like it or not, and I certainly do fucking not, we are stuck together in these cramped tunnels breathing each others farts. So if we're going to be so physically close that pretty much everyone can taste the miasma of shame that hangs around me like some sort of sick bird -”

“Sick bird?”

“Shut up. If we're going to be that physically close, we might as well be... you know...” suddenly he's faltering. He wears a face that says he's trying to find a suitable word, but it tells you he already knows what he's going to say and he's just embarrassed about it. “we might as well be, like, emotionally close too.”

His hand has been crawling towards yours. Here in the dark, in your place, yours and Karkat's, and with that grey tint to his skin, he looks ill. For a split second you wonder what it must be like to be him, to be the hope and then the symbol, to be a politician and a saint at the same time. It's been four weeks since they bombed the East City, when all those people either had to die or had to leave their homes. It's been four weeks and six days since you've been in the tunnels. Dave had a dream the third night he stayed at Karkat's, the fourth night since the Marketplace was bombed and your dad died. Dave said: “it was mostly fire and brimstone. Usual shit. However, I would highly encourage a widescale evacuation in the vicinity of everywhere.” He was tense all over and his mouth hardly moved as he talked.

It was Jade who actually found the tunnels. She kept squirming and fidgeting and eventually she said “this place is stressing me out.”

Dave: Man, join the club. Soon we'll have enough members to make t-shirts.

Jade: Not like that, you fuckass. Like... there's a huge cavern or something, underneath the ground. It's making me super uncomfortable.

Vriska: _(Scoffing)_ How would you even know that?

Dave/Jade: Trust her/me

Everyone: Umm...

It was something like that, anyway. She showed them the closest entrance, behind a house with no front door. A few hammers later and you'd found the maze of tunnels, tied like ribbons underneath the City. You convinced 27 people, mostly trolls and some human mutants (or pale mutts, depending on your position of privilege) to come down there with you before the bombs hit. Now there are thousands, and there's barely space enough to breathe, and hardly enough food or water to go round, and people are sick and dying. You laugh.

In four weeks and six days, he's been kissed, spat on, shouted at, shouted for, shouted with, shouted over (that was a day to remember), punched, questioned, and venerated. Whenever people hear his name they start clamouring round and screaming questions. He's asked you to call him Kankri in public.

You shuffle your hand to meet his. His breath catches and he covers it with a cough. His fingers clasp between yours one by one. You only do this here, in your place, an alcove halfway along a dark tunnel that ends in a wall. Two metal lines run parallel in the middle, like they do everywhere here. Most of the other tunnels have LED lights stuck to the sides, and for the places where the tunnels widen to include a kind of tiled stage, some clever little inventions of Jade's provides large swathes of warm orange light. But this one is a dead end, and no one except you has bothered to light it up, and even then it's only one LED you'd stuck in the alcove a couple of weeks back. It's the only place you can be alone.

“We are emotionally close, Karkat.” You raise your held hands. “I don't do this with anyone else, you know.”  
  
Hand holding is best when no one leads. It's best when there's no destination

You let silence take over for a while as you play with his nails.

“We did the right thing?”

That's how he says it, with an upward inflection added as an afterthought to the word “thing,” like he's trying to make a question sound like a statement.

“I don't know,” you reply, because you don't. You don't like to think about it.

“I don't just mean about that Equius guy and the whole West Provinces thing, I mean from the start.”

You know this is serious because that was only one sentence and it didn't even have swears in it.

“I guess.”  
  
He snarls.  
  
“I don't know, Karkat! I don't like thinking about it. Everything was terrible before and everything is terrible now.”

His body begins to curl in on itself slightly as he nods his head once. “That's what I thought.” You whine.

“No, wait, don't be sad. It's not all bad. I mean, I got to meet you and Vriska and Terezi and Tavros and Gamzee, and I got to meet Dave and Jade in real life. Maybe we were dumb to think we could change anything or start a revolution or whatever, but I got to meet you.”

He squeezes your hand.

“I don't like that Equius guy, though,” you say.

“Neither do I. I have truly never thought it was possible to be sweated on, and then this guy turns up. Fucking unbelievable. I had to change after I shook his hand.”

“He is kind of gross.”

That is, in the physical sense. When you'd talked with him he'd been nothing but polite. Equius was average height, rippled with muscles and seemed to have a glandular condition. One of his horns was broken at the base and the other pointed straight up in the shape of an arrow. Everything about him was something you remembered, but not his face. His face wasn't ugly or pretty, it just was, and you remember nothing about it.

He'd turned up with Vriska earlier today. Vriska was the only one who left the tunnels. “To look for treasure!” Dave and Jade spent their time exploring new tunnels. Terezi went around as her own bastard fusion of Law and Order, even though the Council hadn't actually given her any authority. Gamzee struggled with no access to sopor or an oven and Tavros stayed with him to keep him company. Vriska was the only one who'd seen sunlight in over four weeks.

They were really falling apart, weren't they?

Maybe it was all a mistake.

You miss your dad.

He's shifting on his butt like he wants to say something but thinks you might not like it. “I think I'm gonna say yes,” is what he eventually comes out with.

You nod, slowly. When Vriska came back her eyes were wide and manic, the Equius guy trailing behind her. She'd pointed right at you and asked where Karkat was, and when you told her she immediately started striding away, beckoning at you with an arm as she did it. When you fell instep next to her she was halfway through a sentence which you guess was directed at you, only she hadn't waited for you to catch up.

“...found him just outside, literally just outside the exit! And you won't belieeeeeeeeve what he's here for. Just don't laugh at his accent, okay, it's not his first language. And for fucks sake, don't do anything that he'll get offended at. Just don't speak. You're cute, John, but you're dense as lead.” She'd paused to turn around and pat you on the cheek. “It's endearing, don't worry about it. But don't fucking speak.”

When you asked her who he was, she just giggled and said “for Karkat's ears only!” So you huffed and sighed and followed her, which is sort of ridiculous since you were the one who'd told her where he was.

Next to you, he sighs. “It's not like he's wrong. If we stay down here, we die, and it really is that simple. If this West Province politician he was talking about is the real deal...” He leaves the sentence unfinished.

If you stay down here, you die. Simple as that.

You remember, word for word, what Equius said before he left:

“It would behoove you to stay on your guard. If we can find you, she can. I'll be back tomorrow for you answer.”

They'll give you weapons and training and you'll give them...

What, exactly?

He leans his head against your shoulder and sighs. He's light as a sound.

“Thanks for being here with me.”

“That's okay.”  
  
“No,” he pulls himself up. “Listen to me, John, listen to the words coming out of my mouth which I go completely and utterly out of my way to never say to anyone else. Thank you.”

You swallow a lump in your throat and it honest to God makes a gulp sound.

You look down at your hands, one brown, one grey. He's playing with your thumb, and suddenly this seems much more romantic. You're not really sure how to feel about that.

“Are you okay?"

You nod. You gulp again. 

“Are you sure? You look like you swallowed a pineapple

“I'm okay, Karkat. Really and truly.” Pause. “I think I just need to be alone for a while."

Of course he hates this, because he wants to give you what you want but he doesn't want to let you out of his sight either. You smile (you don't laugh) to reassure him. “I'll be fine. Honest.”

He lets out a huff and rolls his eyes. He gives your hand one more squeeze, then a last squeeze, then a squeeze for luck. He fishes a headlight out of his pocket and pulls the elastic round his head, still scowling. His hair puffs out either side of the strap. He looks ridiculous.

You laugh. “Wow, what a look!”

Karkat sneers at you, and then he smiles, quick and hesitant, like it's too scared to stay on his face. Then he turns around, he puts the light on, and he's walking along the two parallel metal lines of the tunnel.

And you're alone.

And there's no one to be for.

And you let it go.

You rub your hand. You think Karkat may like you. As in _like_ like. Which, really, you probably should have noted earlier, but you kind of had other things on your mind. You feel a blush coming up. You let it go.

Here in the dark on your own and with the quiet like walls you let yourself drain out of your body. You let all the Johns you have ever been bleed out of you. You imagine them going “nooo, pleeeaassse, uggghhhwwbublgh” as they drown into the floor. You laugh.

You scooch yourself further into the alcove and close your eyes. Your memories leak out, streaming from your brain and out your ears. The things you love drip like drool from your lips. Your laughs leave you. You let it all go.

You're going to stay here until you fall asleep, and you're going to sleep for as long as you can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I ended up losing all motivation to finish this after I finished Under Your Bed Sat The Wolf, and that's mostly because I really started to dislike UYBSTW. I still dislike it, actually, but I also started remembering my old plan for this fic and jotting stuff down and a year and and two months after posting the first chapter, here's the second.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry it took so long, and I'm sorry the first chapter is almost gratuitous in its violence, but it will be the most violent in the entire series.
> 
> I am, as always, not happy about this chapter. In fact, there are many things I would change. But I have kept you all in the dark for so long it hardly seems fair anymore.


End file.
